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18 Responses to Randoms

Fun fact: in the late 90s, a group of people and I were talking with Camille Paglia, and someone asked her what she thinks of Bloom’s “Closing of the American Mind.” She gave some thought to her answer, didn’t reply quickly. She said something very positive about the book, but added that its dour tone is a weakness.

What makes the moment powerful in my line is the fact that I believe that the alt-Right — not just a few blogs we all read, but a major nascent intellectual movement — is a synthesis of Pat Buchanan and Camille Paglia. When answering that question, she was facing her inscrutable fraternal brother.

By the way, that evening I also talked with her one on one. She is a very nice, engaging person. She listened attentively (to my then-clueless 20-someyhing self) and came across as genuinely pleasant. High energy too, if I need to add that.

Over the 80 or so generations that China has been using examinations we can expect selection to have improved greatly the gene pool in the direction of more individuals having the genes for taking those exams and mastering the material.

Even if such genes only improved outcomes by five percent per generation (more surviving offspring), that is a lot of generations.

Re Bloom’s book: Reviewer seems to think Rousseau lived before Locke; also, lots of bad grammar.
Re Dreher: isn’t he the fellow who once wrote an editorial for Dallas paper proclaiming Mex illegals to be “Texan of the year” and then failed to understand why anyone would take issue…”I was just doing my job, folks.”

The Irish were (are) mostly Roman Catholic, but with large minorities of Presbyterians and Anglicans Mind you, even if everyone involved in a case was Roman Catholic, the fear that witnesses and jurors would be routinely dishonest was also a problem.

Whether all the child buggering has led to the rise of a Continental-style anti-clerical faction, I do not know. It bloody well ought to have done. If the catholic Irish had any balls they’d leave Rome and form an Irish Catholic Church.

I have zero faith in “crackdowns” on government employees actually improving efficiency. Far more likely it will increase politiking, make-work (increased regulation), and CYA. That’s been my experience with it.

Civil service protection is one of the fe
w things that gets government workers to take chances.

All of these cultural evils are ascribed by Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind to “the German connection.” Relativism, historicism, and an ethic of war in which the strong are allowed to devour the weak, are all evils that Bloom fathers on Nietzsche and his Teutonic tradition.

That said, there is no reason to blame Nietzsche for recent upheavals that could be laid at his doorstep only distantly. If Nietzsche, together with Marx, Darwin, and Freud, is responsible for our multicultural politics, how exactly did he bring that about? Were his tragic view of life and appeal to Homeric epic figures and the rule of Hindu Brahmins responsible for the state of New York’s using public money to pay for liposuction surgery or for the distribution of condoms in public schools, both signs of our decadent times for both Di Clementi and Langiulli? Is Nietzsche responsible for the widening appeal in our political culture of a more perfect equality? Were Nietzschean motives really what was behind the decision of progressive white Americans to vote for a far leftist black in the most recent presidential election? And in Bloom’s brief, how exactly did the hippie Left, which was hysterically antiwar, put itself on the side of Nietzsche’s warrior ethic? It is inconceivable for me that the love-beads bedizened hippies whom I tried to teach in the late 1960s were awash in Nietzschean-texts. Perhaps Bloom’s experience was different from mine, but I for one never heard these hippies talking about the will to power or Nietzsche’s aristocratic radicalism.

But what Bloom and his imitators dislike about Nietzsche and his qualified admirer Heidegger is not their lack of moral traditionalism but their unmistakably anti-leftist perspective.
Bloom offers us this passage expressing his made-in-America patriotism: “And when we Americans speak seriously about politics, we mean that our principles of freedom and equality and the rights based on them are rational and everywhere applicable. World War II was really an educational experiment undertaken to force those who do not accept those principles to do so.” And when Bloom provides an example of the anti-Nietzschean creed that holds America together, we learn the following: “By recognizing and accepting man’s natural rights, men found a fundamental basis of unity and sameness. Class, race, religion, national origin or culture all disappear or become dim when bathed in the light of natural rights, which give men common interests and make them brothers. There was a tendency, if not a necessity, to homogenize nature itself.” Although Christian traditionalists have spurned Nietzsche, and not always wisely, they have not done so for the reasons that Bloom articulated.

We tend to think of the 1940’s and 1950’s as an American “golden age.” Back then morality and truth was hip – or so we are told. Sometimes our naive nostalgia gets the better of us.

This strikes me in relation to Frost’s argument that God is “dead”. People keep insisting that he is in comparison with the past, yet I assert that the very reason we see the past through rose-tinted glasses is that we can’t stop looking for a God that we wish was present now.

I’d be interested to see some analysis on the likely jury composition. What population pool does the jury have to be proportional to? If it has to match Sanford, Zim might be in trouble: 30% black = 3 or 4 black jurors. If Seminole county: 11% black = 1 or 2 black jurors.

According to my rough calculations, the US minus the Hispanic and Black population would score at 103 or so, placing it right after China, and highest among European / European descended nations. (IQ scores from Murray, demographics from wiki)

I wish the US were a plutarchy; at least then I’d know how to ally with.

The US is a loosely affiliated conglomerate of power-holders who play nicely with each other such that each party might attain more and more power.

Eventually, yes, this might break down into a plutarchy, but for now it is neither important how wealthy you are nor do wealthy people regularly get into low-level conflicts with each other (not in the US, anyway. One could argue that Russia or Mexico actually were plutarchies).

Certainly the Art of Writing is the most miraculous of all things man has devised. Odin's Runes were the first form of the work of a Hero; Books written words, are still miraculous Runes, the latest form! In Books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream. Mighty fleets and armies, harbors and arsenals, vast cities, high-domed, many-engined,—they are precious, great: but what do they become? Agamemnon, the many Agamemnons, Pericleses, and their Greece; all is gone now to some ruined fragments, dumb mournful wrecks and blocks: but the Books of Greece! There Greece, to every thinker, still very literally lives: can be called up again into life. No magic Rune is stranger than a Book. All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men.
—Thomas Carlyle

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"To have been always in the right and yet always on the losing side; always being ruined, always under persecution from a wild spirit of republican-demagogism,—and yet never to lose anything, not even position or public esteem, is pleasant enough. A huge, living, daily increasing grievance that does one no palpable harm, is the happiest possession that a man can have. There is a large body of such men in England, and, personally, they are the very salt of the nation. He who said that all Conservatives are stupid did not know them. Stupid Conservatives there may be,—and there certainly are very stupid Radicals. The well-educated, widely-read Conservative, who is well assured that all good things are gradually being brought to an end by the voice of the people, is generally the pleasantest man to be met."
- Anthony Trollope (in The Eustace Diamonds)

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
- H. L. Mencken

The more I see of men, the better I like dogs.
- Madame Roland

vox populi, vox humbug
- W. T. Sherman

Once there was The People - Terror gave it birth;
Once there was The People and it made a Hell of Earth.
Earth arose and crushed it. Listen, O ye slain!
Once There was The People - it shall never be again!
- Rudyard Kipling (quoted from Easy as A.B.C.)

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
- John Adams

[T]he first Whig was the devil
- Samuel Johnson

The people that awakes, first shouts, then gets drunk, pillages, [and] murders, and later goes back to sleep.
- Don Colacho